What's Past is Prologue
In The mirror universe ' |image= |series= |production=113 |producer(s)= |story= |script= Ted Sullivan |director= Olatunde Osunsanmi |imdbref=tt6011058 |guests= Rekha Sharma as Ellen Landry, Emily Coutts as Keyla Detmer, Jeremy Crittenden as Lord Eling, Patrick Kwok-Choon as Rhys, Sara Mitich as Airiam, Oyin Oladejo as Joann Owosekun / Joann Owosekun (mirror) and Ronnie Rowe Jr. as Bryce |previous_production=Vaulting Ambition |next_production=The War Without, The War Within |episode=DSC S01E13 |airdate= 28 January 2018 |previous_release=Vaulting Ambition |next_release=The War Without, The War Within |story_date(s)=1834.2 (2257) |previous_story=Vaulting Ambition |next_story=The War Without, The War Within }} Summary Stardate 1834.2: On the ISS Charon, Lorca frees his followers from the agony booths, among them the parallel version of Landry. A fight with the loyal troops of Emperor Georgiou for the control of the ship ensues. Lorca apprehends the parallel Stamets, who betrayed him and apparently ruined his coup. Stamets has to agree to help Lorca, for a chance to stay alive. He launches a bioweapon that kills many of Georgiou's soldiers. Lorca makes a shipwide announcement that his people are taking control of the Empire, but he advises them not to touch Michael Burnham, to whom he is still attached. Burnham escapes from the throne room and tries to find a way to contact the Discovery. On the Discovery, Stamets and Tilly are concerned about the state of the mycelium network that is dying because the Charon's engine core, the "central orb", taps it for power. Without the spore network, all life in all universes may perish. Lorca and Stamets set up a trap for Emperor Georgiou, in which all of her guards are killed and she can only escape by means of an emergency transport. In the throne room, Lorca celebrates his victory and kills Stamets, as he doesn't need him any longer. Acting Captain Saru and his crew seek a way to repair the spore network, but the only viable method would be to target the heavily shielded central orb of the Charon with a photon torpedo, boosted by the whole mycelium supplies of the Discovery. This would not only cost all the spores that Stamets would need to take back the Discovery to its universe, the ship wouldn't survive the blast in the first place. Saru is not content with this no-win scenario. He motivates the crew to come up with something better. Contacting the Discovery and learning of the plan, Burnham agrees to take down the shield around the central orb. She finds Emperor Georgiou in her hiding place and convinces her to work together to defeat Lorca, by giving him what he wants. Meanwhile on the Discovery, Stamets and Tilly come up with the idea to use the ship's warp drive as an additional protection against the explosion. They prepare to attack and wait for Burnham to disable the shield. Burnham appears in the throne room with Georgiou as her "prisoner" for Lorca. As the Discovery approaches, Burnham and Georgiou assault Lorca's people. When only Lorca is still alive, Burnham spares his life, but Georgiou does not hesitate to kill him with her sword. Burnham takes down the shield. Georgiou vows to stay behind to allow Burnham to escape, as Lorca's troops are about to storm the throne room. But Burnham arranges for Georgiou to be beamed back with her. The Discovery destroys the central orb, the mycelium network begins to regenerate but Stamets does not manage to control the spore drive. Only when he remembers Culber's words from his stay in the network, he intuitively finds a way out. The Discovery arrives in its own universe. But it is nine months too late, and the Klingons appear to have won the war. Errors and Explanations TV Tropes Headscratchers # I have a problem with biology and how the agonizers work. When Georgiou says to Lorca that "your life will be long and every second of it will be in an agonizer booth" and although I know she could just be using a hyperbole I was thinking ... how? Agonizers do not allow the poor people inside to sleep and do not provide water, food or where to excrete. No one can survive in that situation more than a few days, unless you give the victim some time to rest, eat and drink the organism will die after a few days, not to mention the mind will go mad for the pain at some point. Of course she might just been dramatic but then we see Lorca's former crew and it's said that they spent a year in there, you can hardly survive a few days, they won't survive a year, and if they do, they won't be sane and probably won’t be able to walk, much less to start a military operation. They actually look pretty good and recovered very fast from almost 300 days of unbearable pain and sleep deprivation 24/7. Recall that Lorca faked dying in the pod and Maddox immediately tried to revive him so he could torture him more. It's probable they are removed for whatever bare minimum of care is needed to keep them alive. Maybe agonizers are not as painful as they look. After all, people seem to be standing there. Really incapacitating pain would make you fell. They might be "migraine" level of pain, not electroshock level of pain. (Perhaps agonizers only give the perception of pain? For example, getting stuck by a rusty chipped steel nail is painful. Now have a device that makes you remember the pain. With different settings on the intensity of that memory. No physical damage, but all the agony. # When the Discovery arrives to the Charon, why do they allow it to shoot at the Emperor's ship? Why hadn't Lorca put the shields up? He had no reason to believe the Discovery wouldn't attack them, and that first shot it fired almost killed him. Chalk it up to Lorca's belief that the Federation is all into group hugs — and of course, he does have Burnham as a hostage, even in the same room. If he hadn't shown the Discovery crew where exactly she was, they would most likely have been unable to fire. And finally, Lorca didn't know about the mycelium trouble — from his perspective, the Discovery just had no motivation to pick a fight against a massively larger ship that would just cut her to pieces without a second thought. So, the big plan Burnham and Georgiou came up with was to allow themselves to be captured and then... just attack the guards and hope for the best? What if Lorca had decided to put them in manacles or otherwise incapacitate them? Before they were still free to move around the ship and sabotage it, but now they're willing to risk the fate of the entire multiverse on plan that any whim of Lorca or a better aimed shot by his troops would instantly cause to fail. Because they had no better alternative. They couldn't disable the field from anywhere else and Burnham knew Lorca wanted her by his side. It was a calculated risk. Category:EpisodesCategory:Discovery